Their favorite saying is 5 and dive for many of them. Five year commitment and then leaving. Not a great return on the investment for the military or for the taxpayer
The military has determined that five years (or whatever commitment is set for a given branch) is sufficient payback for the education received, and it RELIES on the five-year attrition model as the military cannot absorb all the officers it graduates into the upper ranks. If and where longer service is required (for example, Army Cyber was recently upped from five to six years), adjustments will be made but, once the required commitment has been met, the service is satisfied. There is no shame in leaving the military once the military is satisfied the debt has been paid. How you personally feel about this is irrelevant.
The service academies are NOT the most elite universities. Many of their students wouldn't qualify for the ivy leagues.
Again, a misunderstanding of the mission of the academies. I've posted elsewhere that the rubric used to determine academy appointments, by design, does not value academics the same way civilian colleges weight them. The SAs value a combination of brains, brawn, and leadership somewhat equally–as they must. Until he was fully into his major, our son was underwhelmed by the academics at West Point. The brain trust is there, but cadets sometimes have to seek it out. When he discussed this with his department head, the LTC explained to him that only about one third of any incoming class is selected for academic chops*; the other 2/3rds are chosen for other equally shiny traits. All are academically capable, all pass the academic bar, but only that third is what you might label “scholarly.” Our son learned to value those other critical equally shiny traits in his band of brothers very highly. The corps needs a balance of all of them in a way civilian colleges do not as their missions differ vastly. The Army puts it this way (as inscribed in stone at West Point):
The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools. -Thucydides-
The service academies are looking to produce capable officers for each branch of our armed services. It takes a certain kind of kid to go this route, and those kids don’t always look like the applicants to the usual civilian suspects. If academics rather than service is the main concern of any applicant’s college evaluation, then the SAs probably aren’t for them, not because that applicant can’t be academically satisfied (s/he can) but because getting through a service academy and the years of service that follow takes a gut commitment to something else.
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*The 1/3 that is chosen for scholarship, though, is as rarefied a pool as you'll find anywhere. These are the kids who turned down Ivies and equivalents and who earn Rhodes, Marshall, Truman, Fulbright and other scholarships at the same rate as those top-tier civilian universities. Because these students are mixed in with others whose talents are stronger on the other equally important legs of the military stool, the GPA and test statistics of the academies don't align well with those civilian universities--and aren't meant to.
